Genpact, Wipro, HCL Seeking Stronger Presence In Niche Verticals

Everest Group’s Market Vista report for Q1 2011 estimates the first quarter global transaction volumes for outsourcing contracts at an annual contract value of $3 billion. The number of contracts signed during the year by the business process outsourcing (BPO) segment grew 25% sequentially driven by significant growth across all sectors including the BFSI, manufacturing, distribution and retail and healthcare verticals. However, IT outsourcing (ITO) transactions fell 17% over the previous quarter. Overall outsourcing transactions fell 5% over the quarter but grew 14% over the year.

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Spotify Expected To Launch Movies, U.S. Service

According to ABI research, mobile music streaming will see significant growth in the coming years with the subscriber base expected to cross 161 million by 2016, compared to 5.9 million projected by the end of the current year. That translates to a compounded annual growth rate of 95%. By 2012, Asia Pacific should become the biggest market for mobile music streaming. The report also claims that service providers such as Spotify will be one of the big gainers in this music trend. Below is a graph from the report that shows the geographic spread of this growth.

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Boingo In A Tough Business

According to a report by Cisco, global mobile data traffic grew 2.6 times in 2010. Last year, mobile data traffic recorded data flow of 237 petabytes per month. Mobile video traffic accounted for 49.8% of total mobile traffic last year and is projected to grow to 52.8% in the current year. The growth was seen across smartphones and other handheld devices, and average smartphone usage doubled in 2010 to 79 megabytes per month. Tablets have also become a big user, with more than 3 million tablets connecting to the mobile network last year and each tablet generating five times more traffic than the average smartphone. The report further estimates that 94 million laptops were on the mobile network in 2010, generating traffic of 1.7 gigabytes per month. >>>

Fusion-io In The IPO Pipeline

Today, the VC-funded startup market is full of Internet companies that command sky-high valuations without a robust monetization strategy in place. However, there are also organizations such as Fusion-io that are able to support valuations and IPO plans with a sound product strategy. The company, which was ranked Number 2 by The Wall Street Journal out of the top 50 venture-backed companies last year, recently announced plans to go public. Here is a brief review of a company that has, to date, shipped more than 20 petabytes of flash memory to more than 1,000 organizations.

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Competition In Learning Management Heats Up

In my most recent post on the talent management sector, I said that talent management companies were increasingly leaning toward learning systems. Taleo (NASDAQ:TLEO) acquired Learn.com and another talent management vendor, SumTotal Systems, acquired Learn.com’s rival, GeoLearning. All these acquisitions in the learning space had left SuccessFactors (NASDAQ:SFSF) with no learning partner and forced the company to make its own acquisition in the space. Let’s take a closer look.

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Is Cisco’s Restructuring Too Little, Too Late?

Government spending during the quarter is estimated to have fallen 8% over the year – not good news for Cisco, which gets 22% of its revenues from the sector and is already seeing troubled times. The company’s stock price fell 15% last year. During the current year, while the Dow Jones has gone up 10%, Cisco’s stock is among the worst performers, having recorded a 12% drop in the year. Recently, CEO John Chambers accepted Cisco’s failings and has stepped up effort to pull the company back on track.

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Pandora’s Scaling Issues

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, the money spent per capita on recorded music for the U.S. fell from $71 in 1999 to $26 in 2009. Digital music services such as single song and album downloads, subscriptions, online radio stations, and mobile phone downloads fundamentally changed the way the industry worked, beginning around 2003. By 2009, Internet and satellite radio was earning close to $0.2 billion in revenues and single song downloads were accounting for over $1.2 billion in revenues. >>>

In A Wise Move, ADP Enters Healthcare IT

Unemployment rates in the country inched up marginally from 8.8% in March to 9.0% in April. Despite this only slight increase, the unemployment rate was 0.8% higher than in November. ADP’s report on non-farm payroll recorded the creation of 179,000 jobs in the private sector in April, which is significantly lower than February’s job gains of 217,000 and March’s gains of 207,000. Over the first four months of 2011, an average 196,000 private sector jobs have been created in the United States.

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